I am old and the mind wanders when it gets old. Thus, this is the post in which I write about various random things.
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It’s been a long time since I last mentioned the doujinshi I’ve purchased. Too long; it’s been three months since Comiket 79. I meant to show pictures of all the stuff I’ve gotten but looking through my collection, I was surprised to see how many Fate books I’ve got. Accordingly, this post will mainly be about her, and a little bit about her white devil magician girl compatriot.
Incidentally, a lot of the doujinshi I show here features stuff like monster rape, gang rape, and tentacle rape. If those sorts of things offend you or repel you, I strongly, strongly urge you to continue reading so that I might have a chance to change your mind. Tentacle rape is surely the most beautifullest thing in this world and I hope I can bring people to appreciate its elegance and delightfulness. All righty, with that out of the way, let’s proceed.
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This site has been on the internet for two years now. Imagine that. Just before I started up Tentacle Armada, I was in the throes of World of Warcraft addiction. I abruptly quit the game when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out and decided to kick off a figure review site. I can scarcely recall what things were like back then; it feels like I’ve been running this site for as long as I can remember. Blog years ought to be measured in dog years, where a year of blogging feels like seven years of life.
I don’t spend much time talking about the site itself but as today is an auspicious day, I will make an exception. Let’s take a look at how Tentacle Armada has evolved over the past year.
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So I get an invoice from Shopping Mall Japan and I see that it’s for a promotional pamphlet for a video game that I purchased for 400 yen off of Yahoo Japan Auctions. Then I see the total is $84.35. For a 400 yen item. SMJ uses a conservative exchange rate of 79 yen to a dollar, so 400 yen equals $5.06, and the other fees add up to about $14. And yet I’m getting charged $84.35. What the hell?
(Edit: Never mind, the total listed on my user page displays the correct total. I’m still waiting for an explanation from SMJ as to why the two values are so disparate [or why they are different at all]. I think I’m going to be checking my invoice totals by hand from now on rather than automatically going to Paypal to pay my bills.)
(October 2012 edit: People occasionally find this post while googling for “Shopping Mall Japan.” In fairness, aside from this issue [which was quickly rectified], I haven’t had any problems with SMJ and I’d recommend them if you are looking for a reliable proxy service. They may also have since implemented an automated billing system that might prevent this sort of human error from occurring.)
I’d meant to follow up my Doujinshi and Doll Stuff post earlier, but I wanted to wait till I received the doujinshi that I recently ordered. Now that it’s all here, I can show off some of the stuff that I’ve bought. No doll stuff is included here, though; I had intended to photograph Rei and Asuka (the original Medicom Real Action Heroes dolls) doing lewd things with each other but I forgot about it. I’ll give a quick review: decent likenesses, kinda sucky for playing around with.
A lot of this stuff is from Comiket 78. Comiket is a huge convention and hentai books comprise only a fraction of what’s exhibited there, but I still like to think of it as the greatest celebration of cartoon porn in the galaxy. This is my small homage to this wonderful thing.
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People are surprised when I tell them that I collect dolls, and what is perhaps even more surprising is that I’ve been collecting dolls for far longer than I’ve been buying anime figures. I don’t play around with them much – most are stuck in a drawer or in a couple of cardboard boxes now – but I do enjoy buying them and dressing them up. More recently, I’ve begun collecting doujinshi, and with most of my June preorders yet to ship I thought that I’d take some time to share these things.
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Most of my discretionary spending budget is allocated to figure purchases but every now and then I buy other stuff. Here’s a few things that I’ve picked up in the past month or two.
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So I wanted to buy this porno manga. The first place I checked was Amazon JP but unfortunately they’ve labeled this item as adult and thus will not ship it overseas. Undaunted, I next hit up J-List, knowing that they have a selection of h-manga. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them. I looked up Sasuga Books but they didn’t have it either. Then I found out about Rakuten, saw that they had it, and was delighted to find out that they ship internationally. Delight turned to dismay as I found out that this isn’t one of the items that they’ll ship internationally, but they did provide a link to Tenso along with a recommendation to use them for items that can’t be shipped outside of Japan.
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Over the past few years, I’d given thought to starting up a figure blog, but when I actually kicked it off, I figured that the most likely result would be that I’d have gotten bored after a couple of months and called off the entire enterprise. A year later, I’ve somehow kept up with it and nobody is more surprised that this thing is still going than me.
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I recently spent some time practicing my Photoshop photography skills, and I shot some new pictures of Aegis and Rei. My Aegis photos were one of the earliest photo shoots in which I played around with shadows and a black background. I liked those photos a lot at the time and in retrospect, I can’t quite remember why:
I really am not digging the folds and creases in the background. It makes me want to re-shoot pictures of every figure I reviewed using a cloth backdrop.
I like my new pictures, but I wonder if I’ll look back at these photos a year or two from now and think, “What in the world was I doing? C’mon man.”
Here’s one more image that isn’t quite as dark as the first:
Rei was one of the earliest figures I photographed, and I was still using a ragged blue curtain then as the background. I also used three lamps, one shining from each side and a third illuminating from above. It made for a lifeless photograph, as if Rei were nothing more than a chunk of molded, painted plastic:
How boring is that? Really bloody boring. Rei’s an albino clone girl who slides herself into a tight bodysuit to fight off huge monsters bent on genocide in an apartment-sized robot; she shouldn’t be boring. I think my new pictures are more interesting than my old ones, even though I don’t really have any clue what I’m doing. They’re probably not quite as useful from a review perspective, but I’m comfortable with making that sacrifice in the name of prettier pictures.
